Family-owned Recycling Hauler Taps GPS Insight for $150,000 Fuel Savings

Finding savings and boosting efficiency in the competitive world of water and recycling hauling is never an easy proposition.

But that’s exactly what Parks & Son, a family-owned and locally-operated waste and recycling hauler located in Sun City, Arizona, did thanks to its working partnership with GPS Insight —  a leader in tailored GPS tracking and e-log solutions.

Background
Never wavering from its core values, Parks and Sons has been operating for over 50 years and now maintains a fleet of over 75 collection and service vehicles. In their ongoing efforts to maintain fair, flat and consistent rates for their customers, Parks & Sons has embraced an increased role of technology in operating their business by implementing GPS Insight vehicle tracking devices across 60 of their most heavily used vehicles.

Business Challenge
Over the past 10 years, Parks & Sons has experienced substantial growth, significantly expanding their footprint across the Phoenix area. Prior to tracking their fleet with GPS technology, the dispatchers and area supervisors were relying heavily on CB radio and cellular devices to communicate the physical location and destination of their drivers across 50 to 65 varying routes.

This invariably led to an unnecessary level of calls throughout the day relaying simple, yet vital, location information. “We had to rely on this voice communication to understand the location of our trucks in order to dispatch new orders throughout the day,” said Shawn Parks, Business Manager at Parks & Sons.

With their expansion came added complexity. As new stops were added to routes, assigning them was a manual process; one that did not account for inefficient route overlaps.

Inefficiencies add unnecessary cost to any organization. Not only do route overlaps extend the amount of time it takes to complete area pickups, it extends the usage of the vehicle and the fuel it takes to operate the vehicle. As a recycling hauler, Parks & Sons is proud of their environmental efforts and any unnecessary fuel or vehicle usage detracts from their goal to serve their community.
Aside from understanding where in each route a vehicle is located, Parks & Sons wanted to gain deeper insight into servicing their fleet. The wear and tear on each vehicle is of great concern to any fleet stakeholder and in order to operate at full efficiency, vehicles have to be on the road. Parks & Sons needed a better system to understand which vehicles needed servicing and a better way to get them back on the road as quickly as possible.

How it was solved

Parks & Sons was unique in that they saw the value a GPS vehicle tracking solution would provide from an early stage.

Years before working with GPS Insight, Parks & Sons had implemented GPS tracking from two different providers before realizing that neither of them could provide the service or functionality that GPS Insight could offer. “We wanted a solution that provided powerful tools and features, but with a simple interface. Prior to GPS Insight, we had never experienced a solution that could provide both,” said Shawn Parks.

With GPS Insight, dispatchers at Parks & Sons could get an easy to use birds-eye view of where their trucks were at any given point. No longer would they need to rely on phone calls or CB radio communications to relay a driver’s current location or destination. This significantly reduced the dispatchers’ time spent on these tasks and allowed them to focus on revenue generating tasks like, taking more orders or expanding service to customers.

Route inefficiencies were also addressed through the GPS Insight route replay feature. Dispatchers were able to see the routes for multiple vehicles at one time. Shawn Parks states it best, “We were able to identify route overlapping with ease – it’s all there on a single screen for us to see. Making our routes more efficient has never been easier for us.”

By correcting these route inefficiencies and improving overall vehicle usage, Parks & Sons has seen a fuel savings of $150,000 in the first year alone, far surpassing their initial return on investment. “Fuel is our company’s fourth highest expense – so any marginal change in that cost significantly affects our bottom line.” Through the implementation of GPS Insight vehicle tracking and the use of new, more fuel efficient trucks, Parks & Sons is addressing this tremendous expense head on.

Fleet maintenance provided Parks & Sons with a very unique challenge and opportunity. The organization developed a custom built application specifically for vehicle maintenance. With GPS Insight’s flexibility to integrate valuable data across nearly any platform, integrating with the custom built Parks & Sons application was a very intuitive process. Shawn Parks was elated to know that “The data was ours to access and do with it what we want. That is very important to us, as the more information we can exchange between our different software platforms, the more informed we are to make better decisions.”

Dispatch and management now have full insight into the health of their fleet, knowing at all times where in the field their vehicles are located and knowing which vehicles are currently able to provide service.

When Parks was asked why GPS Insight met their needs better than any other vehicle tracking provider, he stated, “Needless to say, we were looking for specific features that would resolve gaps or holes that other vendors could not provide. Additionally, we needed a partner who would allow easy access to our GPS data to integrate with our back office CRM, dispatching, and maintenance software.”

GPS Insight has strengthened Parks & Sons ability to serve their community and their dedication to providing second-to-none customer service.
When asked to summarize how GPS Insight has improved Parks & Sons’ fleet management, Parks said, “Our fleet tracking solution has helped our business in so many ways. I truly believe that you do not truly understand your business, your routes, or your drivers until you can start tracking your fleet. Every aspect of our business has been improved by implementing GPS Insight.”

To request a GPS demo, click here.

 

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